I.

Tom found the egg in the straw next to the goose. It was heavier than it looked. He picked it up, turned it over in his hands. The shell was hard and warm and when the fluorescent light hit it at a certain angle it looked kind of gold.

He took it to the hardware store in town and asked the guy behind the counter if he knew anything about weird eggs. The guy shrugged. Tom took it to a pawn shop in Youngstown. The pawn shop guy called a jeweler. The jeweler came out and looked at the egg and said that was gold.

"The shell?" Tom asked.

"The whole thing," the jeweler said.

Tom went back to the farm and told nobody. He drank a beer on the tailgate of his truck and watched the goose waddle around the pen. The goose didn't care.

II.

A woman from Cleveland came. She had a clipboard and an accent that wasn't from around here. She took samples. She asked Tom questions. Tom answered as best he could. He didn't know much about science. He knew about driving trucks and fixing engines and the fact that the goose was a good bird. Quiet. Didn't cause trouble.

The woman called some people. Then other people came. People in suits. People with cameras. They put a fence around the pen. They took the goose to a building that wasn't on the farm map. Tom was told to stay away. He stayed away. He went to work the next day like normal. His boss didn't ask about the goose. Tom didn't ask about his pay.

III.

Three weeks pass. The news doesn't come. Tom hears from the pawn shop guy that the egg is in a lab in Washington. He doesn't know what they're doing with it. He doesn't care, exactly. He cares the way you care about something that happened to someone you used to know.

The goose is still in the pen. Tom sees it sometimes through the fence. It's eating corn. It's the same goose. Nothing has changed about it.

Tom sits on his porch with a beer and watches the sun go down behind the closed factory. He thinks about the grad student's words—biological nuclear reactor—and he doesn't understand any of it. He thinks about how the egg was worth more than his truck, more than his house, more than his life has been worth in the last five years. He thinks about how the goose doesn't know any of this.

He finishes his beer. He goes inside.

IV.

Morning comes. Tom wakes up. He makes coffee. He drives to the farm. The fence is still there. The building is still there. The goose is in the pen, eating corn. Tom throws more corn in. The goose eats. Tom goes back to his truck. He has to be at the warehouse in an hour. He starts the engine.

The goose lays an egg. Small. Cracked. The gold inside marred and incomplete.

Tom doesn't see it. He's already driving away.

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